[Canuck]

With the body work in the hands of Mark, I do all the mechanical restoration and assembly. going forward I will post progress on the component restoration. Since I bough this car I have been on the hunt for as many NOS parts that I can locate anf as of this writing I have 677 parts and NOS assemblies ready for this car.
First up is the engine,having given up on the prospect of finding the original engine I bought an NOS 455 short block assembly from a buddy in Chicago who used to work for GM parts warehousing and bought several of these when they were going NLA back in 1980. Had the block shipped to me in its original packaging.



Dropped the NOS assembly off at my machine shop for an evaluation. One school of thought was to bolt on all the parts I had and fire it up. Having heard horror stories of Crate engines not being assembled properly, i went the route of having the shop disassemble and see if it truly lived up to Blueprinted at the factory so you don't have to". NOT
It was cool to see all the parts identified with the lettering and paint daubs.








What was not cool to see was scoring on # 1 and 2 main caps:



Dave, the machinist said he was, and was not surprised. Additionally he reported while all the tolerances were good they we not what he would refer to as "blueprinted".

So the new plan was to go with new rings and bearings, balance all components and fit to specific tolerances. I opted not to boil the block as I wanted to preserve the factory markings.
For the built we went with a Cloyes double roller timing chain and gear set as I could not trust a 47 year old Nylon timing gear.

I asked Dave what could have happened if I had fired up the engine from its as is out of the crate condition. His exact quote was "it would have seized during break in".